In Medieval Europe, heraldry was unregulated, in the sense that anyone
was entitled to bear arms, and there were no restrictions based on class
or any other distinction. This was true also in England, and there are
documents by English jurists which document it: they are quoted in
another article. The presumption, then,
is that heraldry was also unregulated in Medieval England.

An "official" view of heraldic regulation in the Middle Ages appears in
Squibb's article on
the Law of Arms in
England. That article was published in 1967 and summarizes aspects of
the author's book on the Court of Chivalry (1959). Squibb tries to prove that
heraldry is regulated
in England and self-assumed arms are illegal. In doing so, Squibb
reaches back to the Middle Ages and produces two pieces of evidence:

pleadings before the Court of Chivalry in the late 14th-early 15th
centuries

the writs of 1417.

He uses this evidence to try to prove that heraldry was also regulated
in the 15th century. Each piece of evidence will be examined in turn.

The pleadings in the Court of Chivalry prior to the 16th century never
deal with self-assumption of arms, that is, the assumption by a man
of arms not otherwise in use. On the contrary, all cases are brought
by one man against another for usurping his arms. The logical method
to resolve these cases, and the one used by the court, is to determine
who began using the disputed arms first. In one case (Scrope vs. Carminow)
where both parties seemed able to prove usage from time immemorial (going
back even to the Conquest of 1066, we are told), the Court decided to
let both use the same arms.

In the process, both parties would try to prove usage from time immemorial,
to pre-empt the other party's claim. From the nature of the deposition
of witnesses, and from nothing else, Squibb "deduces" that "the right
to arms" was only founded on usage from time immemorial. In
other words, according to Squibb, as of 1400 or so, the only legal arms
in England were the ones born since 1066.

Never mind the known fact that arms were constantly being assumed by
all sorts of people (as documented later in this article). Whatever
the conclusion, it is only a conclusion on the method used by the Court
to resolve disputes over a specific set of arms. Squibb, by a complete
non-sequitur, claims that this is evidence for a prohibition on the
self-assumption of arms.

The only shred of evidence for regulation of heraldry before
Henry VIII comes from a document endlessly but not always accurately
cited by authors, including Squibb.

In 1417, a writ was issued by Henry V
to sheriffs in Southern England, commanding that soldiers who
were about to join the upcoming expedition in France were not
allowed to bear coats-of-arms or armorial tunics of arms if
they did not have "an ancestral right" or a "grant of some person
having sufficient authority thereunto". All men were to register
their arms with persons "named or to be named for the purpose".
An exception was made for those who had borne arms with the king
at Agincourt; they didn't even have to register. It is quite clear that
the writs were issued for the special purpose of the upcoming expedition,
and were intended to apply to men under arms in the forthcoming
expedition, not to society as
a whole. So this is no evidence of regulation of heraldry in
England, and the text by Nicholas Upton
cited above suggests that
the writs did not establish to much control even on soldiers campaigning
in France. Rather, it indicates that heralds, the Court of Chivalry,
and government regulation of heraldry were all involved in military
expeditions, but not outside of the context of such expeditions.

The full text of the writ is available.
Squibb, in his zeal to stamp out any evidence of self-assumption,
claims that the exemption for those who fought at Agincourt is explained
by the presumption that members of the 1415 expedition had already
proven their right to arms. But the text of the writ explicitly
states that members of earlier expeditions had assumed arms without
specific right.

As we have seen, there is no legal evidence of regulation of heraldry in
England on a society-wide scale before the 16th c. at the earliest. But
some have argued that, in fact, heraldry was limited only to
members of the gentry, and that the modern association of gentry with the
use of arms in fact started in the Middle Ages. This restriction may not
have been founded on any legal document we can now identify, but it was
a social convention that had the strength of law. I now proceed to debunk
that myth.

The first problem is one of definitions. What social group are we
considering? There are three terms involved, namely knights,
the knightly class and the gentry.

England's social structure was defined in the wake of the Norman Conquest.
The king was deemed to be owner of the whole land, most of which he
in turn ceded in tenure to various individuals in exchange for certain
obligations.

In 1086, there were 170 tenants-in-chief, who held land directly
from the king, and might be called barons, holding 50% of the
land; 17% was the king's demesne, 25% went to the Church and the
rest (8%) went to minor officials and lesser tenants-in-chief.
The numbers of the baronage remained roughly constant at around
200 to the 14th c.

The barons or lords, in turn, infeoffed some of their holdings
to other men, who held the land in exchange for certain military
services to their lords: these were the knights, who held a
knight's fee. Such as system allowed barons to use some of their
land in order to meet their commitment to provide the king with
a certain number of knights, or mounted soldiers, in case of need.
In the 11th c. there were possibly 4000 to 5000 knights. By the
late 13th c. there were 3000 landholders in the knightly class
,
which comprised not only active knights (about 1500) but also others
who could have assumed
knighthood, but could not or would not. This last group
was composed of esquires. Originally, an esquire
was a man who had not yet completed training to become a knight.
Knights typically had incomes of
£40, while esquires were around £20. Division of land
through inheritances, increasing costs of a knight's
equipment (as well as a dwindling need for knights in increasingly
professional armies) account for the reduction in number of knights,
and the corresponding rise of the esquires. While esquires
did not take up military careers, they played a role as
officials and administrators in the counties. By the late
13th c., the knightly class had coalesced into a social class,
marked by its high status and hereditary quality.

It is important to note that, in England, knighthood
did not undergo the transformation from professional class to
hereditary class that occurred in most places on the Continent.
Rather, the knightly class itself, that is, the pool from which
knights could be drawn, became hereditary, but the title of
knight could only be used by those who actually undertook the
career of a knight. By the 15th century, rare were those, except
in the highest gentry, who were willing to take up the burden of
knighthood: in fact, from the 13th c., the willingness of
the knightly class to pay a fine rather than take up knighthood
became a source of revenue for the king.

In the course of the 14th c., the baronage itself evolved
into the peerage on one hand, about 70 families,
who held an inheritable right to individual summonses to Parliament,
and the bannerets, somewhat intermediate between peerage
and knights, and later came to be seen as part of the knightly
class or the upper gentry. The knightly class itself evolved into
the gentry, with three distinguishable tiers: the knights
(about 950 in 1436, with incomes between £40 and £200; about
500 in 1500), the esquires (about 1200 in 1436, 800 in 1500,
with incomes between £20 and £40) together a fairly
homogeneous group called the county gentry; and lastly
the gentlemen, 5000 or so, with incomes between £5 and £20.
An income of £5 was considered "fair living for a yeoman"
by Sir John Fortescue.
Only the county gentry played a real political role and held
offices in local administrations (the limit was put at £20
income in 1439 for a number of offices).
There is yet another, wider
concept, that of parish gentry, which seems to incorporate
gentlemen, lawyers and merchants who had invested in land,
and richer yeomen: those numbered in all about 6000 or 8000
in the 15th c. Whether this had much meaning is open to
question: this stratum was by essence an intermediate
category.

The term gentleman itself comes into widespread use
in the 15th century only. A law of 1413 required that the
social status or occupation be indicated in all legal proceedings,
and soon after one sees the adoption of the term gentleman
to designate small landholders whose lifestyle placed them above
franklins or yeomen. The title was in effect self-adopted: in
the words of Sylvia Thrupp, "a man was free to judge of his own
ripeness in gentility, subject only to the opinion of his neighbors".
Elsewhere, she comments that, from the point of view of others,
especially chroniclers and poets, "the relative
rating or individual gentlemen [...] rested on a nice balancing
of considerations of birth, lands, and type of service. Enjoyed
in combination, wealth and birth outranked all else. When they
occurred separately, the rating depended on circumstances."

Where did these gentlemen come from? From above and below,
I suppose: impoverished knights who could not hold their
rank any more and younger sons whose lot was small, as well
as merchants, lawyers and successful yeomen who rose upward. The question
of the permeability between merchants and gentry is difficult.
Mingay has a number of quotes, from the 16th-17th c.
it is true, stating that gentlemen could not exercise trade (Locke,
Addison, Steele, Defoe). There is an anecdote of a soldier
in 1433 killing another soldier who called him "no sort of
a gentleman" and claimed he was a haberdasher.

It must be strongly emphasized that the concept of gentry is
peculiar to England. Continental Europe never knew anything like
it. On the Continent, nobility is defined as a legal status
in society which is either inherited or acquired through very
specific procedures, like holding certain offices, or ennoblement
by the sovereign. There was never any definition based on
income, although the prohibition against manual labor meant
that nobles who could not afford not to work might lose their
nobility (in fact, in France, their nobility was not lost,
but went into abeyance, and would return if they quit their
trade or manual labor). And it was not possible for anyone
to glide into the nobility simply by assuming the lifestyle
of a noble. Nobility carried important implications, especially
fiscal exemptions, and exclusive access to certain functions,
offices or privileges, and it was important to make sure that
the concept of nobility maintain its legal content. In France,
in the 17th century, massive inquiries were launched by the
king to ferret out self-assumed nobility. So it would be
a serious mistake to equate the English gentry with the
Continental lesser nobility.

Sylvia Thrupp,
in her monumental work on London merchants, makes a clear distinction
between merchants and the gentility, and treats them as separate
categories throughout, but she spends a good deal of time studying
the interpenetration between the two, as well as the resistances
encountered by merchants as they tried to enter the gentility.
Symptomatically, there was prejudice against merchants marrying
gentlewomen, but gentlemen were quite eager to marry merchants'
(rich) daughters and widows: between a third and half of London
aldermen's daughters married into the gentility. By contrast,
between a quarter and a third of wives of aldermen were from
the gentility, and the proportion was very much lower for the
merchant class as a whole.

There were very few merchant knights, less than half-a-dozen
at all times, and they had been knighted by the king, usually
late in their careers. (The tradition of knighting the lord
mayor of London did not begin until the 16th c.). A few merchants
in the 15th c. called themselves both merchants and gentlemen, but
these were also quite rare. At the time, then, contemporaries,
and in particular merchants themselves, made a distinction between
merchants and gentlemen.

What about heraldry? The heralds were willing in 1530 to give
arms to men with an income of £10 or more, so that would
seem to include about all of the gentry at the time, probably
more. What about before
the 16th c.? Chris Given-Wilson states (p.70): "At the beginning
of the fourteenth century, for example, knights were allowed
coats of arms, but esquires were not. From about 1350,
coats of arms were allowed to esquires, but it was
another hundred years or so before they were allowed to
gentlemen." There is absolutely no reference given for
this contention, unfortunately, and it certainly does
not square at all with the proven cases of 14th c. merchants
bearing arms: one can see how they might be construed as
gentlemen, but certainly not as knights stricto sensu.

The problem, as should be clear by now, is two-fold:
there are no texts restricting heraldry to any class,
and there is no gentry to restrict heraldry to until the
15th century. So, as far as the 14th century is concerned,
either one believes that heraldry was restricted to the
knightly class, or else one has to admit that there were
no such restriction.

Unfortunately for that thesis, there are plenty of counter-examples
from the 14th and 15th centuries. Merchants commonly assumed and
bore arms; they used them on their seals, and placed them on their
tombs; they passed them on to their children; and, when composing
them, they used any charge, not shying away from ordinaries, lions,
eagles, etc.

Sylvia Thrupp discusses heraldry at length in her book: here are
some citations.

"English writers have often stated that the medieval merchant
was not allowed to bear arms, but there is no medieval authority
for this view. In London it was customary for aldermen to
bear arms in the same manner as any military commander of high
rank, and there that their right to do so was ever challenged or
ridiculed [...] Tudor and seventeenth century compilations ascribe
arms to about half of the aldermen and sheriffs of the 14th c. and
to all but two of the 15th c. aldermen. [...] In 12 of the 14th c.
cases the men's monuments or surviving impressions or their seals
supply an exact confirmation of the heralds' record, and in several
more there is similar evidence that the arms were at least in the
family, near relatives having used them on seals. [...] For the
15th c. aldermen there is archaeological confirmation either of the
fact that the men bore arms or of the exact charges as given in the
books, in at least seven cases, and in a few others there is some
contemporary allusion to their possession of arms.

But it was not necessary to be an alderman in order to possess a
coat of arms. Several of the 14th c. aldermen had been making use
of armorial escutcheons on seals long before they were elected, and
impressions of nearly 80 other shields of arms have been found from
the seals of London merchants who never arrived at aldermanic rank.
[...] On the whole there is little doubt that the use of arms was
fairly widespread among London merchants in both centuries, and provincial
deeds and monuments indicate, in the same way, that the custom was
also common among the greater provincial merchants.

Merchants must have acquired their arms by one or other of the same
means that were open to gentlemen. One means was by inheritance. Some
of the armorial merchants of London may have inherited their arms from
ancestors of gentle rank; in view, however, of the large proportion of
London families that were not of gentle origin, it is unlikely that
this was the rule. Another means was by grant from the king. This would
have been a rare honor [...] According to his epitaph Sir William
Walworth was so honored, receiving a coat of arms when he was knighted
for his services in the Wat Tyler crisis. Yet Walworth's arms had been
engraved on his seal at least 4 years before the date of his knighthood.
[...] A third way of acquiring arms was to purchase an official patent
from a herald [...] Only one such grant to a London merchant has been
found [...] there was a fourth way of acquiring arms---simply by
assuming them. Many merchants who had no family arms may have saved
the herald's fee, relying on a painter or a seal-cutter to devise a
coat of conventional design. [...]

Outside the merchant class, citizens were in general too poor or
too closely identified with their trade to develop many of the traits
of culture that were associated with gentle rank. Those who required
a seal for business purposes were often content with one of round or
oval shape depicting the tools or material of their craft [...] Some
had shield-shaped seals but by preference either filled them with simple
graphical trademarks or else contrived a coat-of-arms from pictorial
devices of their trade [...] There is no reason to suppose that heralds
would have challenged those as not armorial [...] A few, however, broke
into the more aristocratic armorial tradition, one glover bearing a
lion's mask, a brazier a lion rampant, a brewer two dragons; and well-to-do
corwainers, chandlers and others would follow the fashion of placing the
predatory and fantastic creatures of conservative heraldry on seals of
other shapes."

From her book, and other sources, I have drawn up an
armory of London merchants, based essentially on seals. There are
about 80 names in it, mostly from the 14th c. but also from the 15th c.
A majority of these merchants were aldermen, and members of guilds,
or livery companies as they later became known: hence they were
prominent merchants. But, as emphasized above, they were not part
of the gentry. It is interesting to peruse this armory. It shows
that the design of merchant arms does not often betray the status
of the owner (although fishmongers seem partial to fishes). It
also shows that, very often, arms were adopted by merchants fairly
early in their career, 20 or 30 years before their deaths or
retirement from public life. In other words, they did not wait for
success or becoming aldermen to take arms. In fact, a number of
seals belong to merchants who apparently never made it to alderman,
and to merchants belonging to far less prestigious guilds. The
earliest example of armoried seal belong to a 13th c. butcher,
for example.

The limits of the available documentation have prevented me from
looking elsewhere than in London, but Thrupp makes clear in the
above passage that armorial bearings were not used only by
London merchants.